STOCK OF HERRING DISTRIBUTED TO THE WEST OF SCOTLAND

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14 June 2012

Ian Hudghton, on behalf of the Greens/EFA Group – Mr President, this report was unanimously adopted in the Committee on Fisheries, and that is not a frequent occurrence on fisheries issues, which can be highly controversial at times. Our rapporteur says in the report that his report is about safeguarding Parliament's rights under the Treaty of Lisbon. The fact is that the Lisbon Treaty has created a confused and unsatisfactory situation in relation to fisheries management decision-making. The CFP reform process provides an opportunity for us to re-examine and radically change the whole structure of fisheries management by sweeping away the overcentralised methods which have so badly failed us in the past. Instead of obsessively safeguarding the rights of EU institutions, we ought to be designing a framework of decision-making which will actually work, and which will succeed in its objectives. In my view, that means maximum decentralisation so that Europe's fishing nations can be empowered, working together in logical sea basins to conserve stocks for their own long-term benefit; and yet the Commission claims that the Lisbon Treaty prevents them from proposing as much decentralisation as they would like. Parliament's legal services take a different view. The result is confusion and endless wrangling about EU institutions' rights. I hope that this Parliament, as part of the CFP reform process, will put the preservation of fish stocks, and therefore fishing-dependent communities, first, before this obsessively protectionist view on our own input and our own centralised management systems which have miserably failed in the past.